Fair Fiasco

Last Updated on August 27, 2017

My parents came to town today to visit, and we made plans to drop by the Coastal Carolina Fair, a regional (versus a state) fair held each year in Ladson.

I’ve only been to Ladson one other time in my life, and it was last year, when I went to the same fair. If things had happened that time the way they did today, we’d have never made the trip.

Fresh off their hour-and-forty-minute trip into town, we chit-chatted at home for a few minutes before piling in a car bound for the fairgrounds. I had Googled the address and I knew that I had two choices when it came to an exit off of I-26: I could either take 205B or 203. I chose 205B, because it looked like a more direct route.

As we were driving merrily along, we passed one of those lighted electronic signs that are used to relay messages to motorists. The sign read, “Fair Traffic, Use 205B.”

All the better, I thought to myself. My choice seemed to be the one they wanted me to make. (They being the highway patrol, of course; I doubt seriously whether the fair organizers cared which exit we used, as long as we showed up.)

So we took exit 205B, as instructed, and found ourselves right on Highway 78, which is where the fairgrounds is. There was just one problem: there was massive amounts of traffic. So much traffic, actually, that my mom, who’s easily the most patient of the three of us, said she was ready to turn around and forget before we got into the fairgrounds.

We inched along for a couple of miles. It was literally an hour and four minutes before we got into the fairgrounds! From my front door, we had reached the appropriate exit in about ten minutes.

I grew up with the South Carolina State Fair in Columbia each year. The fairgrounds for the State Fair are located right across the street from Williams-Brice Stadium, where USC plays football. There are, for reasons I’ll never understand, days in which USC has a home game on one of the Saturdays that the fair is in town. As you can imagine, tens of thousands of cars in the same place trying to attend one of the two events can create tremendous traffic jams.

But I’ve never waited an hour in that traffic. And the traffic in Ladson involved far fewer cars.

Sunday morning after church, I stopped by my favorite coffee shop for the far-too-expensive caramel macchiato (made with low-fat milk and sugar-free ingredients) and I asked a city cop sitting at a table why traffic was so bad. He says it’s because people who live there don’t want the road expanded, despite the fact that it clearly can’t handle the traffic load.

If that’s true, maybe they ought to move the fair somewhere else. I’d be a lot more likely to return next year if I knew that kind of traffic delay wouldn’t be the “norm.”